Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author
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That market already exists and has existed for quite some time, you make it sound like literature has always been an AI dominated market and salt of the earth people are finally about to get their chance. I assume this is not what you meant and that I am missing something or possibly you know something that I don't and my perception of reality is fundamentally flawed. The latter is more fun but I suspect the former to be more accurate.
More to the point, I think there is a good sized market out there for AI writing, many who are into technology are going to want to read what AI can produce; this will take some writing away from people but it will be minor and most of the writing jobs which AI will take are those that the bulk of writers complain about, those jobs they say destroy their souls and rob them of their artistic freedom, the contract jobs.
Junk like Buzzfeed news and similar sites that just regurgitate other content existed before ChatGPT, I guess those serve some purpose, though I've always thought they mainly exist to host ads and to trap people in a maze of links and pop-ups. ChatGPT can write that junk just as well as a person.
At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles. I will just click off of that stuff until I find something written by a real person. I hope more people do the same. The novelty will wear off sooner or later and we'll recognize LLM-generated writing as nothing more than vapidly useless filler. In a culture schooled with writing presented as a chore, where the number of words in an essay matters more than an original thought, LLMs promise to relieve a lot of people of the burden of thinking and writing.
People losing their jobs to ChatGPT don't even call themselves writers, at least not seriously. They produce content, most of it regurgitated the same way ChatGPT does it. If I produced content for online click farms I would worry about so-called AI. I don't think Murakami or Cormac McCarthy have to worry, but James Patterson might get replaced by an LLM (if that didn't happen already -- hard to tell).
In my own profession, some programmers already express fear for their future because Github Copilot and ChatGPT can write code just as good as they can. That should tell them to level up their skills, because if whatever they do can just get automated away by a glorified auto-complete they weren't adding enough value in the first place.
Exaggerated voices might give you variety, but I don't actually want to read a piece on the style of any of those voices. I would, however, be intrigued if it could write like me, or like any of the famous nonfiction writers who I've consciously patterned my style after (Isaac Asimov, Mary Roach, Cecil Adams, Michael Pollan)?
Much of the existing LLM have been trained to sound dry and always the same and require creative promoting to get around that, but they very much so are capable of creative, thoughtful pieces based on increasingly long amounts of information and instruction you can provide.
That capacity to fool people with apparently meaningful and creative content may have some value in the market, but I think that value amounts to the same value the market assigns to what currently gets churned out by people working in "content production." Not zero, but not the same value we assign to actual creative writing.
Small complaint, Buzzfeed News was serious legitimate journalism, and made some of the most important investigative journalism achievements of the past decade. Buzzfeed (sans News) is the garbage clickbait side of the company.
> At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles.
You're thinking of OpenAI's products. Raw LLMs do not sound like ChatGPT, which has been RLHF-trained into the soulless automaton you describe. LLaMA for example is less coherent, but is indistinguishable from a real person in its tone and mannerisms. If you ask ChatGPT a very ridiculous dumb question it will politely answer it fully, like an obedient untiring servant. LLaMA will tell you to stop being an idiot, just as a human on Reddit or HN would.
The ability to imitate someone's tone (long a staple of satirical writing), or to fool a lot of unread people, no doubt represents a true achievement for LLMs. But people easily fool themselves and believe what they want to believe, so LLMs simply play into the limitations of human models and explanations for the world rather than representing a new form of conscious being.
I think we can see an analogy in craft production versus mass production. Today machines can produce (for example) furniture of very high quality, rivaling or exceeding the output of a craft carpenter or joiner. The mass-produced goods cost less to make and have good-enough quality, and can even sometimes fool people into thinking a skilled person made their table. That doesn't mean we should call those machines carpenters or conclude the machines possess the same skills. With LLMs we see mass production at scale come to writing and some other trades (law, customer support, etc.) that we like to think of as requiring actual skill. Maybe other trades such as programming will also fall to LLM mass production. But that happens because the jobs consisted mainly of rote and repetition in the first place, and require little creativity or intelligence to imitate.
I mean, if you look at the barrage of reboots, franchise installments and "memberberry" sequels that make up the bulk of cinema blockbusters...
Except kids learn everything with tapes, updated and improved using new knowledge created by a rare few, beamed into their heads rather than depending on LLMs.
It's also a Stargate episode: https://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/learning-curve/
If the quality is only half as good but the AI can put out orders of magnitude more material faster, that could be the direction that may be preferred by some content publishers.
Naturally, there's no accounting for taste.
Artificially, we'll just have to see what passes.
:D
But it actually needs a lot of guiding and editing to get something you want. I'd say it's similar to code generation, LLM can generate something not quite right or just broken, and you need to ask to fix it or tweak the prompt until it gets what you need. Or you might need to combine pieces from separate generations.
So it seems strange a professional writer would get replaced with just ChatGPT and "$0 overhead". Maybe you could hire someone for less pay, but it's like hiring a ChatGPT-assisted junior dev and expecting good output.
that said, ai is still a lousy writer. I've tried to use it to generate stories, and they tend to always repeat the same themes and the same tropes, unless you jump in and provide a compelling skeleton for characters and plot or you spend a lot of time generating options and picking the best.
I don't know however if that is enough to make a job out of it because it's a skill that's quite easy to learn.
i feel like they would almost have a point here if they could calm down a little
nice to meet a fellow empath
Let’s say there’s a UBI, there’s still a ton of jobs that won’t be taken over by the robots for at least the rest of my life that will still need to be done. If we learned anything from the Covid unemployment benefits it is given a chance people will sit at home instead of working for essentially the same amount of money.
What they don’t ever explain is how they plan on incentivizing people to do all the crap jobs. Everyone always talks about the writers and programmers needing to get compensation for their lost jobs but for every one of those there’s probably a dozen people who would get a raise from a UBI and just stop working.
Unless there’s an underclass that is prevented from collecting the same UBI as the displaced white collar workers I can guarantee you there will be nobody taking that job to suck out your septic system.
And I’m intentionally ignoring any economic impacts of a UBI because I’m more interested in how people propose to solve this without creating a virtual caste system.
Or is it that you think shitmen make minimum wage or something? Anyways, the answer is simply that _UBI IS NOT MEANS TESTED_ so working won't take any of it away, just give you more money. Even if UBI was on par with your salary we'd be talking doubling your income. If that's somehow not enough the market will have to value those jobs higher until there is equilibrium.
Because people claim it’s the only solution to AI taking the skilled jobs. Tax the owners of the AIs and distribute this to the people who no longer have jobs because of the automation.
TFA specifically implied this or why else would they have gone on a rant about how the government doesn’t do enough to provide for the people?
Arguing for a UBI and universal Healthcare as though government welfare programs are an obvious must for any government is ridiculous. By all means, arguing for why they're necessary federal expeditures is on thing, assuming that it's a given part of any government is completely ignoring the tradeoffs that must be accepted for such programs.